Effective project management education is essential for the development of a profession at the crossroads

Effective project management education is essential for the development of a profession at the crossroads

This paper asserts that there is a lack of a conceptual framework for the development of effective project management education. Formal education has been almost totally lacking for project management, which has ‘emerged’ as a profession from the hard disciplines of engineering and construction where management of large and complex undertakings necessitated high-level skills and competencies. Today, project management education is migrating to the postgraduate business schools where its application in softer environments for implementation of business strategy, technology programs, marketing campaigns and organisational restructuring requires students to learn an even wider range of skills and behaviours. Practitioners have formed professional bodies and taken the initiative in producing bodies of knowledge and competency standards for professional practice. Accreditation by such bodies often does not value tertiary qualifications highly and focuses primarily on the demonstration of a narrow range of vocational competencies, and this places their approach at odds with the commonly held view of what constitutes a profession. As universities increasingly embrace project management education, there is a lack of a theoretical framework and empirical research into what constitutes effective education for project management and development of competent practitioners, and university-based educators and industry are at odds regarding the direction of education and accreditation. To support the assertion, this paper provides an overview of the exploratory qualitative stage of doctoral research, and includes a review of existing literature on project management education, an analysis of semi-structured interviews with representatives of major stakeholders, and an outline of future stages of the research.

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